The White Christmas Inn

Auteur
Colleen Wright was raised in snowy towns in Michigan, where she loved curling up by the fire with a good book at Christmas. She now lives and works in Brooklyn.

Résumé
In this heartwarming, feel-good novel, a snowstorm brings a cast of very different characters together at a sleepy New England inn, just in time for Christmas—and maybe even in time for a Christmas miracle.

A New England inn seems like the picture-perfect place to spend the holidays. But when a snowstorm shuts the roads and keeps them all inside, the guests find themselves worrying that this Christmas may not be exactly what they dreamed of.

Molly just needs to keep her head down and finish her latest book, but her writer’s block is crippling. The arrival of Marcus, a handsome widower with two young girls, is exactly the distraction she doesn’t need.

Hannah was hoping for a picturesque winter wedding, but her plans come crashing down when her fiancé calls everything off. She reconnects with her childhood friend, Luke, when he comes to check on his grandmother before the storm.

Jeanne and Tim don’t know how they’re going to keep the inn open another year—or how to bridge the distance between them in their marriage. With a flurry of unexpected guests, they’ll have to work together to fix all the problems that crop up. But will it be enough to rekindle their relationship?

With faith, and a little bit of Christmas magic, the inn—and its inhabitants—might just make it through the holidays after all in this “beautiful story about strangers becoming friends…and having an unexpectedly joyous time” (Publishers Weekly).

Échantillon de lecture
The White Christmas Inn

AS THE INN APPEARED on the crest at the end of the snowy drive, nestled in the folds of the gently rolling Vermont foothills, Molly Winslow actually laughed aloud.

Her anticipation had been building ever since she’d turned off the main road. She’d soon spotted the hand-painted wooden sign, almost as big as her car, which featured a Victorian-style painting of the inn itself, done up in holiday glory. The gables were festooned with swags of pine, the windows blazing with warm light, and the drive crowded with guests around a lit fir twice as tall as the inn. There was even a horse and carriage, for good measure.

Molly had picked the inn, out of all the charming establishments vying for holiday traffic on the various travel sites, because of details like this. The reviews for Evergreen Inn had been excellent, but what she had really fallen in love with were the pictures: a single magenta button rose laid beside pats of butter hand-pressed into the shape of chickens or daisies, the incredible hand-pieced velvet crazy quilts featured in every single room, the collection of antique blue glassware that sparkled like sapphire in the pictures of the airy kitchen.

Molly even knew from her deep Internet dive of Evergreen Inn that the sign that led guests from the main road changed seasonally: in fall, a different painting featured Vermont’s spectacular show of autumn color, and in spring, the sign was suffused with pink and white apple blossoms.

Whoever had appointed the details of Evergreen Inn, Molly had decided, was an artist. As a kind of artist herself, Molly was drawn to it all. Her whole job was building brand-new worlds out of nothing but a handful of images and words.

But as an artist, she was also aware of the distance that sometimes lay between an artist’s grand visions and what they were really able to create, between what they promised and what they could actually deliver.

And this wasn’t just a hypothetical piece of wisdom for her these days. The deadline she was under for her next book had been keeping her up at night now for weeks. And during all of those long nights, not a single hint of inspiration had sparked in her mind amidst the giant crowd of worries.

That was part of how she had managed to convince herself that the Christmas trip to Vermont wasn’t a frivolous luxury, but a legitimate business expense. It was a chance to leave the worries back home in Brooklyn and get a much-needed change of scenery to coax some inspiration out of hiding before the anxieties caught up with her.

But although some part of her longed to be swept away into another world, she still had enough hard-nosed Brooklynite in her to hold a certain air of skepticism as she wound her way up the long drive. Not very many things, she’d found, actually lived up to her imagination. And even when they didn’t—well, a lot of times, it was still a good story.

Which was why, after several bumpy minutes on the winding private lane, when the inn finally became visible beyond a stand of snow-dusted trees, she burst into laughter.

The place wasn’t just as lovely as she’d imagined it.

It was better.

She’d thought that the giant fir in the drive was probably just an artist’s invention, but there it was, twinkling with lights. Not only was the green roof of the inn trimmed with pine, but the evergreen swags were dotted with red velvet ribbons and trimmed with what looked to be silvered grapevine. A rocking horse stood guard on the wide porch, lacquered bright red, with a buffalo plaid blanket under his kid-sized saddle.

As soon as Molly pulled up into the circle drive around the base of the fir and opened her car door, she picked up an incredible blend of aromas: the clean spice of pine, a faint hint of smoke from the giant fireplace she knew was waiting inside, and a strong scent of cinnamon, which no doubt was wafting out of one of the ramshackle complex’s several chimneys.

Not only that, but the light snow that had been falling during the early part of her drive had really started to stick once she reached the country roads of Vermont, coming down in big, fluffy flakes. They dusted the green roof, the bare branches of the oaks, and the pine needles, and fell silently around Molly as she pulled her bag out of the back and crunched through the snow to the front door, feeling as if she’d just awoken in a snow globe.

In fact, she thought dreamily, maybe that could be a story: a little girl who suddenly finds herself in a snow globe world . . .

But as Molly stepped through the front door, her thoughts were once again interrupted by the beauty of the real world.

She stood in a roomy, welcoming entryway, set off from the main building by a garland of juniper, whose waxy blue and pink berries were in turn set off by sprays of wild roses. A hurricane lantern with a real flame glowed on a small table just inside the door, beside a small pewter dish filled with tempting golden candies labeled Rosemary Caramel in elegant script.

Straight ahead, she could see fire leaping in the fireplace that dominated the large lounge, filled with overstuffed furniture and velvet and faux-fur pillows. It was decorated to the hilt for Christmas, with a tall Christmas tree covered with vintage-style tinsel in one corner, and a large nativity that appeared to have been hand-carved in the other. All around the ceiling, Christmas lights twinkled among the branches of the same pine, juniper, and red-rose swags that graced the entryway.

To her right, she recognized the collection of tables in the inn’s stylish dining room. Each of the tables was set with a pine-and-poinsettia floral arrangement, and a vintage light-up Santa stood in one window, his nose and cheeks bright red, as if he’d come in from the cold just before her.

But somehow she didn’t notice the woman behind the front desk, to her left, until she heard a small, lively voice call out from behind her.

“You must be Molly.”

Molly…